A partial list of things that have been worse for Democrats than HRC's nomination, in which I do my best to offend all:
- Humphrey's nomination
- The McGovern–Fraser Commission
- McGovern's nomination
- Carter's nomination
- Cardigans
- Mondale's nomination
- Bill Clinton's nomination
- Welfare "reform"
- Bill Clinton's p****
- Rise of 24-hour cable news
- 9/11
- Kerry's nomination
- The Great Recession
- The ACA
- Expiration of the payroll tax cut
- Infatuation with Bowles-Simpson (IBS)
- State-level right-to-work legislation
- State-level voter suppression legislation
- Obama's entire second term
McGovern-Fraser is an unacknowledged villain throughout all of this. Both parties have immense problems with their presidential nomination process over the past several decades, and the modern primary cluster has a great deal to do with this.
Democrats in particular have consistently selected nominees who make for either poor general election campaigners or poor presidents. It would be difficult to design a process that produced worse results and created more enmity.
McGovern-Fraser set the stage for the social issue-identity politics that dominates the Democratic Party today. It's what set the stage for the decline of Organized Labor as a force in our politics.
I was a young teenage liberal from a Democratic family (at least my Mom and Grandma were, and my late father was) during McGovern's run for office. I had hoped that McGovern would work a miracle and beat Nixon because I wanted the Vietnam War to end, but I also remember thinking that there was something wrong with the AFL-CIO actually remaining neutral. Weren't Democrats "The Party of the People"? I watched their convention in 1972, and all I could think of while watching a bunch of longhairs, blacks with huge Afros, and radical Women's Libbers was how this wasn't going to go down well at all with the adults I knew. Yet all these people were delegates, in part because of the fact that they were McGovern loyalists (and he was, after all, the winner), and in part because of the rules set forth my McGovern-Fraser. Lawfully-elected delegations were unseated over challenges, and unelected delegates who were deemed more representative took their place.
Rep. Wayne Hays (D-Ohio) said it best: "They reformed us out of a Presidency in 1968, and now, they're going to reform us out of a party!" Hays was a ruthless scumbag in many ways, but he was entirely correct here; people who were VESTED in the Democratic Party were being pushed aside by people who were not vested in the Democratic Party; they were vested in their particular movements, and their presence in the Democratic Party over time has made the Democratic Party subject to the movements of Radical Feminism, movements like BLM, LGBT, and the Open Borders crowd. Maybe that's why the GOP wins; in the GOP camp, the tail doesn't wag the dog. You don't see the Religious Right giving ultimatums to the GOP in the way many of the leaders of the mass constituencies of the Democratic Party do to THEIR party.
